Doing research on a paper I am revising- really fascinating overview of Franz Boas- the father of anthropology- and of cultural relativism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas

…which is a thorn for many of us right now and a bit of a mixed bag- of course- the opposite would be cultural absolutism- which isn’t so popular either- this social-cultural stuff- very thorny and it isn’t so surprising:

“At the time, Boas had no idea that speaking at Atlanta University would put him at odds with a different prominent Black figure, Booker T. Washington. Du Bois and Washington had different views on the means of uplifting Black Americans. By supporting Du Bois, Boas lost Washington's support and any chance of funding from his college, Carnegie Mellon University”-

Booker T Washington who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama is viewed as the more conservative person of the day- and being friends with Theodore Roosevelt- who was both Republican and Progressives of the day- but at odds with Du Bois- who was a Marxist- actually a Stalinist, even after the abuses of the Bolsheviks became known- which has tainted the better parts of his legacy up until present day. The fights between Booker T Washington- Dubois, and the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey (who is cited frequently in CRT literature with Du Bois) are legendary- neither of the three liked each other very much up until death- and three very different visions for African-Americans following reconstruction that you can see still in current discourse.

From the paper I am working on:

Cultural Relativism

                Sasso (2001) provided some of the most cogent and forceful discourses against the extremes of cultural relativism, which in many ways, is as problematic as cultural absolutism. In his now seminal paper describing the retreat in the field from empirical inquiry and objective knowledge, Sasso (2001), expressed many concerns that he, and others in the field of special education were having regarding the relativistic influences of post-modern ideologies. Sasso (2021) noted that the initial, largely liberal, civil and disability rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s were characterized “by a faith that logical inquiry, reason, and knowledge would support their positions and bring about needed change in society.” (p. 178). This “liberal spirit” according to Sasso “informed the 1960s and early 1970s and provided the energy and impetus for the civil rights and women’s movements, as well as the science of behaviorism in education and psychology.” (p. 178). Overtime, these movements began to “espouse forms of cultural relativism, which, for want of a better term, can be called postmodernism, an intellectual current characterized by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a myth or a social construction.” (p.178).

And

Gross and Levitt (1998) describe a hard break after the civil rights movement between the intellectual old and new left regarding the role of science, the nature of reality, and how issues of justice should be conceptualized and pursued. Gross and Levitt refer to the intellectual left in academia collectively (and somewhat cautiously) as “The Academic Left” (p. 2), although to be more precise, the term and competing viewpoints should be divided into the largely activist and non-empirical “postmodern left” and the “empirical left.” In this break, the postmodern left largely rejected a scientific and empirical viewpoint and instead embraced a strong form of social-cultural constructivism whose epistemological position is:  “science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the “real” world. It is a discourse, devised by and for one specialized “interpretive community,” under terms created by a complex net of social circumstances, political opinion, economic incentive, and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and have existed historically…science deludes itself when it when it asserts a particular privileged position in respect to its ability to “know” reality (Gross and Levitt, 1998, p. 45).

We should talk about during a meeting sometime the difference coin terms nomothetic and idiographic because they are used in educational psychology still in regards to research.

All the grand “meta” theories, ideologies, and narratives the post-mods said are dead are back again- in force…trickling down to us in education- a minefield.

MDB

Mack D. Burke, Ph.D.

Department of Educational Psychology

Applied Behavior Analysis and Special Education Programs

Behavioral Education & Assessment Research (BEAR Lab)

School of Education, Baylor University